Big Business vs. Parents on Education in The Capitol – Big Money and Big Lies Winning
The conviction of the Senate that they HAD to pass SB1177 Every Child Achieves Act has been hard to understand. Grassroot groups like Eagle Forum and the American Principles Project have been lobbying them to remove the federally mandated testing, the sections that give the USDoED final approval of state education plans and the expanded collection of individual student data. Out of one side of his mouth, Senate HELP Committee Chairman Senator Alexander has agreed. “I trust the state much more than Washington,” he said. “The path to real accountability is not through Washington, D.C., it’s through the states.” But from the other side of his mouth come statements like this.
“These important measures of student achievement [assessments] need to be reported publicly so parents can know how their child is performing. It is important the results be disaggregated so we know if any particular group of students is being ignored or left behind. It can also help teachers support students who are struggling to meet State standards.”
Each one is its own contradiction and a contradiction to his earlier statement about who should control the process. If it is only parents who need to know how their child is doing, then there is no need to publicly report results, and certainly no need to send those individual student results to DC. For the people in DC to believe that they can tell from a set of semi aggregated scores on a test of reading ability whether some subgroup is being systematically “left behind” is an absurdity and again says that they don’t trust the state to look at those numbers and figure out what is going on. The last statement is the most ludicrous of all. No teacher believes that standardized tests offer them unique insight or support for the educational needs of any particular child. That statement is just a sprinkle Alexander threw in on top of his sundae of pablum to make him sound like he cares about teachers and little children.
In order to make sense of why the Senate and the House have been so in favor of the the ECAA (Senate) and Student Success Act (House) which promise local control in some sections and completely strip it out in others, you merely have to look at the statement of the US Chamber of Commerce covered in TheHill.com
In looking at the federal money allocated to education the USCOC said, “no taxpayer wants to see this investment wasted. When federal dollars are being spent, it’s entirely appropriate to demand results for the investment.”
Its one thing to say we don’t want to see money spent on roads producing crappy roads because it was not spent well. That refers to macadam. But the results they are “demanding” from this money are specifically higher test scores which little children are expected to deliver. The COC also supported NCLB which believed that it was appropriate to demand that every single child perform at grade level. Sometimes, gentlemen, Big Business vs. Parents on Education in The Capitol – Big Money and Big Lies Winning » Missouri Education Watchdog:
